GStreamer and Google Summer of Code

Are you a student? Do you belong to the best and brightest among us? Then you probably woke up this morning wanting to do a GStreamer releated Google Summer of Code project. But to your horror GStreamer was not listed as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code.

Well things are much brighter than they might look at first glance. In fact GStreamer is available as a Google Summer of Code project from a long list of mentoring organisations and GStreamer hackers are mentoring or offering to mentor many of them. I will try to give an overview of projects available.

GNOME:
There are multiple projects available as part of the GNOME project. Proposals already listed there are doing a Gst-editor
application for GStreamer 0.10 using Python and improving the integration of bluetooth devices in GStreamer(this second project could maybe be integrated with Bastien’s bluetooth manager project). There are also a few Totem related projects, like improving the Totem Mozilla plugin, getting GStreamer DVD support working in Totem and Annodex support in Totem (the annodex project might be mostly Xine hacking actually as GStreamer already supports Annodex). There is also a project proposal from the Jokosher project to work on LADSPA support in GStreamer and Jokosher.

Through our close collaboration with the Xiph.org project there are many GStreamer related projects listed on their Summer of Code page. Projects include doing MXF plugins for GStreamer (MXF is the container format used in the TV industry), RTP plugins for Vorbis and Theora, OggMNG support and more. In fact almost every Xiph.org project either includes GStreamer or would be of direct use for the GStreamer project. I strongly recommend taking a look at them.

KDE
KDE has a project to create a GStreamer backend for their Phonon media playback framework. I am also sure that they would be open for more proposals from interested students. For instance do Edward Hervey offer to mentor a project to create a qt/KDE frontend to the Pitivi non-linear video editor using the KDE Python bindings.

The handhelds.org project list a number of tasks related to the GPE embedded environment where GStreamer could and should be part of the solution like their VoIP proposals. This work should probably be based upon the work of the Farsight project who are working on this in context of Maemo.

has a project about evaluating and maybe porting XMMS2 to use GStreamer. A good project to take on if you want to limit fragmentation and help consolidate the desktop.

Others:
There are other projects too who probably would accept GStreamer related projects. Remember that as long as you are able to find a mentor most organisations are happy to take in good projects proposed by students. For instance BBC Research would probably be willing to take on Schroedinger – Dirac related projects or the MXF plugins also listed under Xiph.org. David Schleef, is willing to mentor a student writing a Dirac encoder targeted especially at desktop recording, using things like X damage extension for instance. The Mono project might be interested in taking on a project to do a plugin for f-spot that took selected photos and created an Ogg/Theora/Vorbis movie file of a slideshow of the photos transitioned with effects and muxed with audio from say a rb/banshee playlist. iPhoto on Mac OS X has a similar feature and so does ULead CD & DVD PictureShow on Windows. The MythTV project might be interested in a project to port it to use GStreamer. The Creative Commons project might be willing to take on a project to ensure easy CC tagging of all files generated by GStreamer. The examples just goes on and on. The Gimp project maybe would be interested in a Pitivi/Gimp integration project using GEGL.